'''Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the hackerspace Noisebridge, our ongoing mission to explore strange (yet economically priced) new ascent technologies; to seek out new parts and new partnerships; to boldly go where no non-government-or-massively-industrially-funded-group has gone before.'''

'''Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the hackerspace Noisebridge, our ongoing mission to explore strange (yet economically priced) new ascent technologies; to seek out new parts and new partnerships; to boldly go where no non-government-or-massively-industrially-funded-group has gone before.'''

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Latest revision as of 01:50, 25 February 2014

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Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the hackerspace Noisebridge, our ongoing mission to explore strange (yet economically priced) new ascent technologies; to seek out new parts and new partnerships; to boldly go where no non-government-or-massively-industrially-funded-group has gone before.

Contents

Spacebridge is a project that documents the necessary steps to produce a cheap and easy deployment platform for lofting instrumentation and photographic equipment into the stratosphere. We approach this project with a heavy slant towards education, with a hope to bring science education away from something that you know because of a dusty old book, to a hands on experience.

The Spacebridge project is run out of the Noisebridge hacker community, a non-profit educational corporation for public benefit provides an infrastructure for technical-creative projects.

The Spacebridge project can be broken up into 3 parts. The payload delivery system, payload bus, and the payload itself.

The delivery system is currently a meteorological weather balloon that lofts our system about 100k feet into the air (commercial airlines fly at around 32k feet). The system also includes flight lights for increased visibility, a radar reflector dish for visibility by radar tracking systems, and a four foot parachute to help slow the decent.

The payload bus is an environmentally protecting enclosure that keeps all the payload items secure and in a known orientation and attached to necessary ports. It also protects the electronic equipment from the cold (it's around -30 degrees up there).

Lastly, we have the payload itself. We currently loft 2 cameras that have been hacked so that custom software can be run on them. We also send up an android cell phone which records accelerometer, magnetometer and GPS data, and text messages me the GPS data for our recovery. We also send up a secondary tracking system that consists of a commercial GPS tracking system, an opentracker (a custom made system to convert the GPS signals into APRS data packets) and a ham radio to transmit those data packets.